over 180 day hold

[Cluvens]

Hi Folks,

We were undergoing a a very bad experience with PayPal in the past year when we just started our business. It is such a painful process when working with Paypal in regard of our payouts.

I will start with a brief introduction of our business. We are a newly startup selling computer chairs worldwide.  We were still new and invested most of our seeder fund into ramping up production for our factory in China. Hence, we are not at the stage of renting proper warehouses in different countries just yet which essentially forces us to do drop shipping at this early stage. Also, given that each of our single shipment is approx. at 2 cubic meters in volume and around 150kg in weight. It is far too expensive to do the shipping through regular retail couriers. So all of our shipments are being handled by logistics, where most of the time there will not be a tracking available.

We collect all of our payments through PayPal initially and we were trying our best to upload as much as tracking information to PayPal. However, because of the excessive shipping time when doing drop shipping, it is hard for us to keep the orders on PayPal update on time. Then PayPal decided to put a minimum reserve on our account of 500k! But at the time they put us in minimum reserve, the customer support who called us specifically mentioned that our fund will be available after 180 days. We have confirmed it several times, and he was repeating that we can just seat tight and the money will be available after 180 days.

However, it is now well over 180 days and our total sale of 70k USD is still on hold! we were actively buzzing their customer support for an answer of why the reserve is still there, but none of them were helpful. They tend to just copy and paste a standard answer asking us to review their reserve policies over and over again without answering our questions directly. We’ve tried call them or message them through their message centre countless times to ask them kindly forward our case to their “back office” that is in charge of going over special cases and hoping to get an answer of what exactly to do to improve our financial stress. Each session is painfully long and helpless and we have to describe our case over and over again, and all we get most of the time is just a brainless templated response stating that they are trying to protect customers for chargebacks. We understand that, and that’s why we accept the term of having most of our sales held by them! But we are talking about half a year and who on earth will do a chargeback after such a long time?

We understand that our current business model is risky in Paypal’s perspective. That’s why we were trying our best to provide as much as information on our side to work with them and gain their trust. But they are totally ignorant and doesn’t care for our business! Now we are at a very bad financial situation that we need that money ASAP, and they can’t even give us a specific guideline on when or how we should get our money back! 

I’m not entirely sure if there are any other business owners experienced a similar case before or not, though there are a lot of similar discussions in different forums, which probably indicates that this is not a corner case! Paypal is not being an honest payment gateway. They do not care for the survivability of small startups like us! And their customer support is the worst.

We did migrate our payment processor to stripe a while back, and it never had being any problem! It’s really just PayPal that is being a jerk in releasing our fund and they are trying their best to be ignorant and steal our money! 

We are looking for any advice on how to solve this puzzle or if there are anyone who is experiencing the same situation than us, we hope that we should strongly stand together and put PayPal under a law suit!